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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28584456">a love of beautiful things</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/jewishhelenarobles/pseuds/jewishhelenarobles'>jewishhelenarobles</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Graceling Realm Series - Kristin Cashore</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Other, Trans Character, and trans communists, cities that don't exist, which are sort of my brand at this point</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 05:47:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,307</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28584456</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/jewishhelenarobles/pseuds/jewishhelenarobles</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Katsa learns something new about Po in an unfamiliar city.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Katsa/Po | Greening Grandemalion</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>a love of beautiful things</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>When I did my recent reread of this book, I didn't get to the latter two in the trilogy, so this is probably very canon-divergent although I've tried to keep it consistent with the precious little plot I remember and the geography of Cashore's world. Hopefully it isn't too jarring; I might reread Fire soon and attempt to write a sequel to this that grafts the jagged edges together (and cracks Katsa's egg too while I'm at it).</p>
<p>As always, I am transmisogyny-exempt and physically abled, so if you're a trans woman and/or a blind person, please let me know if anything rings false and I'll fix it as soon as I can.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Katsa did not like the city. It was close; it smelled; it was full of dissonant sounds and lurid sights and people, always people, that you had to speak to and brush past and buy things from and make yourself unthreatening for. Give her a single skin of water, a knife, and an isolated forest any day — there was no possible urban comfort that could make all this worth it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Blessedly, she and Po weren’t to be much longer here; they were only passing through this circle of borderland hell on the way to the Dells, and there was plenty of empty road between here and their diplomatic reception committee. Po had gone out to hunt for information about potential allies to the Council, as he had done every night since they arrived on Monday, and once again Katsa was alone in their tiny, amber-appointed room. Alone, and useless. It was quiet, relatively, but the muffled street sounds still oppressed. She scowled. Morning couldn’t come fast enough.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She could have easily just commanded herself to go to sleep, but she found that she was too riled to want to. What was this benighted place to her, that it could shake her so? There was surely nothing to be scared of here that she hadn’t braved in the last three Monsean towns they’d passed through. She could be with Po building a relationship with the leader of a people’s revolt right now if she weren’t such a nervous, boorish wretch. She paced the length of the room, but, as she knew from hours of the same activity, it took only two or three strides to cover it lengthwise, and the long dull confinement was only adding to the pressure building inside her head. Exasperated beyond belief, she pulled on her boots, threw a cloak over her unshed day clothes, and darted down the inn staircase into the street. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Immediately, she regretted it. The shouting and clattering and scraping were magnified tenfold, and there was no lemongrass censer to shield her from the smell of unwashed bodies and animal excretion out here. But she couldn’t very well turn back now; that would be tantamount to letting this place win. She set her face and started walking.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Katsa had no direction in mind. She simply went, taking random turns and passing through unmarked alleys, knowing her inner compass would take her straight back to the inn whenever she had had enough. While her gaze stayed fixed on the ground and occasionally at the flow of traffic for the first quarter-hour or so of her journey, after a time she couldn’t help but let it linger on the exotic displays of humanity around her. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There were women here in dresses with no waistlines, but straight-hanging front pieces embroidered with bits of glass; there were men in boots made of some skin she had never encountered in all the seven kingdoms, carrying short swords shaped like little sickles. There were buildings made of a sandy stone fashioned in arches and cantilevers that stretched precariously all the way across the narrow streets, where people in the richest apparel leaned their arms on the low walls and gossiped with their neighbors, and a whole warren of ground-floor rooms where more scantily-clad women lounged in the doorways and men in shabbier attire than their second-floor counterparts engaged them in conversation. As Katsa made her way further toward the western end of the city, the buildings grew flatter, taller, and more regular. One of the larger ones sported fifty windows; Katsa saw lights in almost all of them. She marveled. She had never encountered such opulence in all her life.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her brain still buzzed unhappily, but the temptation to drink in the city drowned out all else now. Impulsively, she resolved to go into one of the buildings — not a brothel, to be sure, but one of the second-story places that had caught her eye, whose purposes she could not discern through their half-open doors. She had seen two such places in the near-hour she had been walking, and they puzzled her. There were mostly men in them, but plenty of women too, and judging by their dress they weren’t all rich burghers or landed lords either. They held drinks, but the places weren’t taverns. There was no hay in their doorways, nor did the people in them seem drunk.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She decided that whatever iteration of the mysterious establishment she next encountered — and she was fairly certain there would be more — would be her destination. She wasn’t wrong; she found the next one up a set of steps above a tavern that smelled of coriander seed and frying butter, its pockmarked black door open onto a dim, vaguely blue interior. Katsa scrambled up the steps behind a pair of men carrying those funny swords whose faces were almost as scraped-up as the door. She entered into a room that answered none of her questions, but produced a great deal more.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Blue silks lined the left and right walls, interrupted only by a few grimy oil braziers set frighteningly close to their folds. The back wall was near totally obscured by the throng of talking, laughing people and the fragrant smoke hanging above their heads, but with a couple of jostles and excuse-mes, Katsa moved in far enough to see that it was lined with shelves full of books. She marveled. What on earth could this room actually be </span>
  <em>
    <span>for?</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>As she drifted further toward the bookshelf wall, she caught snatches of conversations being had around her: a woman in one of those splendid gowns decked with mirrors debating various methods of food distribution and their relative efficiencies with another woman in washerwoman’s drab; two men with hands smeared with dried-out bricklayers’ daub discussing a petition to the nearby lord; an armed man with funny curled moustaches declaiming what seemed to be poetry, perched on a tuffet close to the wall and surrounded by seated people transfixed by his carrying voice. It was like three Council meetings and a festival rolled into one. She made for the poet, hoping to get a closer look at his audience, but a figure hovering by the closest brazier made her look twice. She peered closer. Her heart stopped.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was Po. He was a woman.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He was dressed like a fine lady of this city, in gown and frontispiece, his hair wrapped in a silk scarf like some of them wore. He sensed her, she knew it; his shoulders were stiff. She could feel herself turning to fire all over.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He was the loveliest woman in the room by a long way. How had she not seen it before? Something clicked into place that it never would have occurred to her was missing, but that now seemed correct, essential. She made her way over to him. His face was a rigid mask.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She took his hand; it was trembling. He was more panicked than she’d seen him since he revealed his Grace to her. “You look beautiful,” she said, her voice rough, and she opened her mind to him so that he knew the words were true; and he relaxed, and the rictus of fear turned to wonderment.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Others around the room were embracing and kissing each other’s cheeks, so Katsa had no compunction about holding him in her arms. They stayed that way for a time, and when they drew apart, Katsa asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Po nodded. “Not here,” he said. Katsa squeezed his hand — she realized now that she hadn’t yet let it go — and they made their way back out into the night.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The smoky book-room was called a salon, she learned, and it led onto a childless burgher couple’s ornate apartment through a door behind the draperies. The people in it came from all over, though many studied or worked at the city university; most were affiliated with a loose organization of people much like her Council, which had begun to draw the displeased eye of the country’s overlord and with which Po had begun to formulate a plan for an alliance. The latter part she knew, since Po related every piece of information pertinent to the object of their mission to her — but she had pictured a secluded room like the one at Randa’s castle, not somewhere their business could be heard by the whole street.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“They’re hiding in plain sight,” said Po. “Salons are permitted if the fees are all paid, and these burghers have deep pockets. It’s not technically a political meeting. Recruitment is more important to them right now than secrecy, but that’ll probably change soon.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What of the food stores you told me about, for the city’s poor?” Katsa asked. They had arrived at their inn. Po threw a dark cloak over the bright dress, and they made their way up the stairs to their room.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Underneath, in back of the tavern below,” Po replied, latching the door behind them. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Katsa nodded. That made sense; it was where she would have placed it. But her mind wasn’t really on politics. She had a more pressing question, one she had been burning to ask since she saw Po in that room.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Are you,” she began, and drew closer. Po’s eyes were wide. “Are you — why did you dress this way?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Because I chose to,” said Po, voice only a little shaky.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you want me to do anything else different, when you’re dressed like this?” she asked. Her mind was unguarded, to make the love behind her words as clear as could be. She didn’t know why — she had a vague notion that she should probably be upset about something or other — but love truly was all she felt, and behind it something hotter that she hadn’t yet untangled.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Po looked for a moment like she had suggested a trip to the moon, then laughed, a little, only softly. “Call me ‘she,’ when you think of me,” she said. “Nothing else. That’s all.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Katsa was certain that that wasn’t all, and she was determined to ferret the rest of it out; but for now, she drew the drapes, and led Po to their bed, and they spent a long time in it with precious little conversation.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t want to be a woman only when I’m dressed like this,” said Po, stroking Katsa’s hair. She wasn’t wearing much of anything anymore, but Katsa caught her meaning. “It makes me feel good to wear these clothes, but they don't make me who I am. And besides, they’re not very practical for riding or hunting or fighting or much of anything, really. I’m the same person as I was in that room when I’m on a horse, or in combat, or lying with you. Especially when I’m lying with you.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Katsa cast her gaze into the corner of the room at the discarded frontispiece, which she now knew had been purchased with the help of a shopgirl who was under the impression that Po was buying it for her lady friend. Po couldn’t even see herself in it, not really, and she’d still gone to the trouble of lying. “Go on,” she said. She was fairly certain she understood, but she wanted Po to say her entire piece.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s… difficult, though,” said Po, “when I’m wearing my usual clothing, to know that people don’t see me that way. Especially when some brute thinks he and I have some sort of common cause in domination of women. It’s very, very hard not to beat people like those merchants from Sunder to a bloody pulp.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I can certainly understand </span>
  <em>
    <span>that,</span>
  </em>
  <span>” said Katsa, scowling at the memory of that long-ago encounter.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“On the other hand,” her lover continued, “people have a whole other set of unpleasant feelings toward me when I do go out like this. It hasn’t been very often — a couple of times in cities we’ve passed through, and on the solstice in Lienid a very long time ago — but every time, there have been looks, and thrice I’ve had to go into an alley to avoid a fight.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It’s horrible, Kat,” she said. “Men look at me and think me beautiful, and then they look again, and they want to kill me. I can feel it as intensely as if the thoughts were my own. But even if they don’t see, their lust is itself a weapon. It’s as if they don’t know how to love, only how to possess. I always saw men treating women like that and knew I somehow wasn’t safe around them, but it’s one thing to know there’s a blizzard outside your door you’ll eventually have to brave and another thing entirely to be in it.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was peculiar; Katsa knew exactly what she meant, because she’d felt it herself. Often, in the streets, her short hair and trousers got her mistaken for a young man. It was sometimes easier — men didn’t pay nearly as much attention to her — but if anyone looked more closely at her and decided they’d been deceived, she knew she’d have to quickly re-establish her monstrous reputation to keep them from exacting what they felt was just compensation. And at Randa’s court when he had made her wear dresses, well, she’d drawn their gaze all the time. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to kill her, but they’d wanted to make </span>
  <em>
    <span>some</span>
  </em>
  <span> kind of sport of her. She knew she could protect herself, but that eased the weight only fractionally.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s what really bothers me,” said Po, responding to the tail end of her thought. “It makes life decidedly harder, but if it really came down to it, I could take any of those men easily. And so could you. But what of the others like us? Men don’t protect people like us, not even fathers and brothers, and women like me—” her voice tightened a bit with the phrase, and Katsa squeezed her hand “—need it even more than most.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Katsa knew she was right, and the wheels were already turning, but she was still caught up in the first link of Po’s logical chain. There were others like them?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Some,” said Po. “It’s safer the more there are in one place, and there seems to be a fair amount here. In Lienid, too.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Katsa wondered if she had known any, at home.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not many,” she said. “It’s a little different there. There’s a place for us in the world; we don’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>have </span>
  </em>
  <span>to hide, exactly. People like Raffin and Bann, too, who aren’t quite like us but love other men, or other women. But it’s like with all women in the Seven Kingdoms — they say we’re only different, but everyone knows that ‘different’ means ‘lesser.’ There’s only a few professions available to us, usually to do with craft work or sex. A few take other jobs or travel, but almost all of them are like you; they go in men’s clothes, and they can fight. So I knew people like us, I saw them when I went out in the cities there, but I knew that if </span>
  <em>
    <span>I</span>
  </em>
  <span> ever tried it there would be hell to pay from my father. And besides, I wanted to hunt and fight and travel. You can’t do that if you’re forever serving other people.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It seemed to Katsa that she had been doing that anyway, what with her Grace and having always to hide it for other people’s benefit, responding to requests that hadn’t even been asked. Po smiled slowly, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her before. “Perhaps you have a point, Kat.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What made you finally decide to — to try it?” Katsa asked aloud.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Po thought for a moment. Then she said, “When I was very young, eight maybe, there was an astronomer visiting my father’s court. To look at the stars from the highest possible vantage point, you see. She was a woman, and she wore dresses that looked like they might as well have been men’s robes. She held herself… she walked like a man. I loved her immediately. I didn’t understand why, but I always wanted to be near to her.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Katsa pictured a very small Po following an austere woman around like a lost puppy and held back a giggle. Po elbowed her, but she was smiling.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I worked harder at my mathematics lessons because of her,” she continued. “I had no head for it, but I wanted to be able to talk to her about something. She taught me how to calculate an angle of inclination with a sextant and how to name and order all the stars in the sky. My brothers all teased me for it. They would make jokes about how I was the world’s puniest Shaleheart. Finally, one day, Silvern got irritated with me and told me I’d never have a chance with her even if she weren’t older than the hills, because she only loved women; she had a female lover besides, a sailor, and she was going to go away with her as soon as she came back ashore. I was devastated. I stayed in my room for so long that Silvern even apologized.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was amazing, Katsa thought, that such an old memory could have sustained her for so long.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh, it didn’t,” Po replied. “I kept myself from thinking about it for years. And then when I was sixteen she came back to court. Alone; her lover was at sea again. I was dumbfounded, all over again, that a woman could do the things she did and still be received by the king of Lienid. She wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t been so brilliant and such an asset to the ministry of sea-transport. She remembered me, and received me in her rooms to talk, and told me all about the things her lover had seen beyond the sea…”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They stayed, quiet, in each other’s arms for a while.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Anyway,” said Po, “I decided that I was going to travel as much as I could, for my father, and see if I couldn’t have the kind of life the astronomer’s lover did. It got me through a great deal. I haven’t worked anything out yet, but I’ve met people like them here in this city. More than that — they were people like me.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That stirred a question that had been brewing in Katsa’s mind for a while. Why had she taken such pains to hide this from her? Why hadn’t she sought her counsel, as she did for most everything else, that they could have come to a solution together?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Po flushed. “I was scared. That’s all there is to it. You were the first thing that ever made me feel like a whole person, and I didn’t want to lose you. And I was afraid, after the way you found out about my Grace, that one more piece of unwelcome information would chase you away forever.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Never,” said Katsa out loud. “I would never leave you.” You make me feel like a whole person, too, she thought. She drew Po in for a kiss, first light and close-lipped, then deeper.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They fell asleep some hours later, Po first, as usual. Katsa’s mind swirled with what Po had told her. She thought of the Council alliance. She thought of meeting other people like them. She thought of expanding her self-defense lessons, and the nagging feeling she’d been having for months that they were a bandage on an arrow wound with the arrow still stuck fast in the flesh.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She looked over at her sleeping lover, dark hair strewn across the pillow like a cloud of the smoke from the salon. She smiled. All that could wait until morning.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Pressing a kiss to Po’s forehead, Katsa ordered herself asleep.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Lord Shaleheart and the Demoness, as I have unilaterally decided, is an epic poem analogous to Romeo and Juliet or Pyramus and Thisbe in the Seven Realms.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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